Explanation rather than defense. The process of cargo-culting makes a lot of sense over evolutionary timescale, because only very recently have people started to discover and achieve the means of not working by trial and error (and falling prey to ritualised processes and local maxima).
I mean, it's fine for people not to dedicate all the brain to all the things all the time, some level of cargo-culting makes us way more efficient in more pressing / important task trough the day.
like, shaking a tv remote usually helps getting some life into it. there's some reason to it, it scrapes a little the oxidation between the batteries and the contacts, but for most people is cargo-culting, imagine everyone having to do a research on it before accepting shaking as the methodology, and this for all the daily tasks we do because we saw our parents do before us.
